By all rights, The Call—starring Halle Berry as a frantically overpermed 911 operator trying to save the life of a kidnapped teen—shouldn’t have been this good. Featuring a committed performance from its star and shrewdly effective direction from indie filmmaker Brad Anderson (The Machinist,…
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As Sam Uley, the leader of The Twilight Saga’s feral—and uniformly handsome—wolf pack, actor Chaske Spencer has spent the better part of the last decade starring in one of the most popular film franchises of all time, a high-profile role requiring equal parts physique…
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The bombastic CGI spectacle Oz: The Great and Powerful, directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco as a two-bit Kansas magician circa 1905 who becomes an unlikely wizard, is a let-down, a movie so consumed by technology that its spirit gets crushed. A…
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The flower of evil grows within a teen girl in Stoker, a deliriously stylized psychological thriller from Korean director Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy), about some increasingly disturbing family dynamics that take root after the husband and father’s accidental death. But that’s not really what Stoker…
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January isn’t known for good movies, but Warm Bodies, the immensely appealing romantic comedy about a post-apocalypse where a melancholy zombie named “R” falls in love with a human girl named Julie, both lonely and looking for connection in isolated worlds, is a real…
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The worn out zombie genre gets a welcome reboot in the winning Warm Bodies, about a zombie and human who fall in love and—what else?— change the world. Based on the popular novel by Isaac Marion and directed by Jonathan Levine (The Wackness, 50/50)…
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Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, about the decade-long hunt for and ultimate killing of Osama bin Laden, is an unmistakable masterpiece. It’s also a picture that does not reach out to us with character, sentiment or resolution – and is nonetheless an essential, thought-provoking,…
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Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is an explosion of violence and humor and delicious performances, a visceral and upsetting portrait of slavery that borders on blaxploitation at times, all wrapped up in a spaghetti western. It’s a movie so entertaining for each of its 164…
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